Mark Twain in the Company of Women
Riverboat pilot, Western correspondent, silver prospector, and world traveler, Samuel Clemens has long seemed the quintessential man's man. To Laura Skandera-Trombley, however, he is a writer who intentionally surrounded himself with women, one whose capacity to produce fiction had almost as much to do with the environment shaped by his female family and associates as with his own talent and genius.In Mark Twain in the Company of Women, Skandera-Trombley resettles Clemens in the company of...
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Selected by Choice magazine as an Outstanding Academic Book for 1995BooknewsSkandera-Trombley combines a biographical study of Clemens' life with his wife, Olivia Langdon, and their three daughters, Susy, Clara, and Jean, with new readings of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and Personal Recollection of Joan of Arc. She contends that Clemens intentionally surrounded himself with women, and that his capacity to produce extended fictions had almost as much to do with the environment shaped by his female family as with the talent and genius of the writer himself. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)
List of IllustrationsAcknowledgmentsList of AbbreviationsPrefaceIntroduction1Polishing Off a Genius12The Charmed Circle243"Youth" and "Gravity"404Elmira, Queen of the Southern Tier: Era of Reform, Part 1655Elmira's Cultural Influence: Era of Reform, Part 21046"I am woman's rights": Olivia Langdon Clemens's Feminist Intimates1317The Circle Dissolves1558The Resurgence of Mark Twain171Epilogue197Primary Works Cited199Secondary Works Cited205Index211
\ From the Publisher"[This book] supports a valuable idea, that Samuel Langhorne Clemens's relationships with women and with feminism contributed to his creative life to an unmistakably large extent. . . . Skandera-Trombley unearths a stunning array of material on the intersection of nineteenth-century American feminism and the nineteenth century's most important literary figure."—Nineteenth-Century Literature\ "This book is to be applauded for its ambition, for its revisioning of the positive power of the 'company of women' on Clemens's career, and for its careful and revealing historical research."—American Historical Review\ \ \ \ \ \ BooknewsSkandera-Trombley combines a biographical study of Clemens' life with his wife, Olivia Langdon, and their three daughters, Susy, Clara, and Jean, with new readings of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and Personal Recollection of Joan of Arc. She contends that Clemens intentionally surrounded himself with women, and that his capacity to produce extended fictions had almost as much to do with the environment shaped by his female family as with the talent and genius of the writer himself. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)\ \
